@mlncn @hongpong I suspected Dries would find you both via the wiki having blazed some of the trail beforehand, so I didn't want to extend the post to point out what I suspected he would find quickly enough.

Simultaneously, my intention was to do a "BCC Webmention" of sorts so that the two of you were at least aware of his original post if you hadn't seen it. Sorry if it read as spam to some extent, but I didn't really have specific posts on all of your sites that would have made a huge amount sense to highlight to get them in via a traditional mention or a reply. Thus I did a few homepage webmentions to get them in under the wire, so to speak.

I don't think it's a common pattern to ping someone's site this way, but given the precedent and prior art within email, it seemed like a somewhat useful way to send the notification without making it so explicit. I'm glad you received it and understood at least some of the intention.

I didn't see a webmention endpoint on Dan's homepage, so I'm glad to have the chance to explicitly @mention him on Twitter with this post.

Within the past month [it's guestimated that over 1 million webmentions](https://snarfed.org/1-million-webmentions) have been sent on the internet. There's not really solid research on how many sites physically send and/or receive them, but as of [last June](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkc5afFohmI&t=2s) the conservative number was in the range of about 5,000 and the number is increasing rapidly, particularly with platforms like micro.blog (5-10,000 accounts) now supporting them out of the box and CMSs like Drupal (via plugin) and Perch having added them since then. This also doesn't take into account an anecdotally sharp uptick of adoption on WordPress via plugin, most notably by several WordPress core developers.

@mrkrndvs I'm curious if you manually cut & paste your replies for others' sites (who may not support webmention or even pingback/trackback) into their old-school comments sections?

I often worry that without that, or without replying to versions on Twitter if they syndicated, they won't see my response via pingback/trackback or other means. Instead my reply sits all alone on my site and they don't have the benefit of seeing it at all unless they come across it organically otherwise.

Generally when I manually cut and paste replies, I'll often use the comment's "website" field to include the permalink for my comment and then I'll take the permalink for my comment and add it to my syndication links since I've manually syndicated it.

Sometimes I notice that including multiple links in a reply can also run afoul of spam filters.

Interestingly we both used WordPress, Hypothes.is, and Twitter to carry on the conversation. I was quite impressed that he took the time to circle back around and document my end of the conversation since he must have missed my pingback (he doesn't have webmentions) and my manual cut & paste, but did manage to see the notification on Twitter.

It all just goes to show that you've got to keep your eye on the tech that you and everyone else is using until it's broadly and evenly distributed. One day perhaps...

Oddly my install doesn't know how to process wementions to that particular (pseudo or archive) URL, so I didn't get the webmention somehow (or it's hiding really well). Perhaps better to have used a homepage wm instead? I only saw this ultimately as the result of your wiki edit. I still laughed out loud though.

The sad part is that Patreon is able to act as a bank of sorts on behalf of thousands of creators so that patrons can donate to several dozen causes and reduce the transaction fees overall by bundling them into single transactions rather than dozens of transactions with higher fees. It helps to overcome the problem of micropayments in a sense.

I saw your note about taking payments directly and I'm considering switching over to that, though It may be easier to do either quarterly or annual payments so that you get a larger chunk of the payment compared to smaller ones on a per episode basis.

In addition to the payment side, you may have noticed that I "fixed" the support announcement side: http://boffosocko.com/2017/12/22/a-supporting-page/ This reminds me that I still ought to reset my iTunes password (which I never use) to log in and send you a positive review there. If only iTunes would support webmention so you could own your reviews...

The more I think about archiving the web this week, the more value and stability I think that the W3C's Webmentions spec could be adding to the internet and copies of it. #DtMH2017https://indieweb.org/Webmention

@frank Webmentions are an extra generation or two beyond the traditional pingbacks/trackbacks. The receiver actually verifies that the sender is displaying the permalink on a physical page before accepting it, thereby cutting down on spam (there have been no reports of webmention spam in the wild yet.) Webmentions and their structure are also set up to allow the receiving site to better handle display which often includes the name, avatar, and either excerpts, or complete comment. I use them in WordPress and there's generally little if any difference in the display of Webmention replies and comments natively put into the system manually. Webmention also allows additonal types of mentions including likes, bookmarks, reads, listens, etc. to distinguish for context.

By the way, once you fixed the URL on your first original webmention, it did come through and is listed in the Mentions subsection at the bottom of the comments: http://boffosocko.com/2017/10/25/your-licenses-frankly-my-dear-cogdogblog/#comments It shows up as a mention instead of a reply, because the URL that fed through was the raw one (i.e. without a class in the body of your response). If you fix the emoji portion and click save that URL will have a u-in-reply-to which should cause your response to show up and be parsed properly as a reply instead of just a vanilla mention).

If you'd like to discuss the subtleties of any of this in person, feel free to catch me on my phone number on my homepage. :)

This will cause the URL to be wrapped with the appropriate microformat class "u-in-reply-to" that will trigger your webmention plugin and send your response to me. Without my URL on your page, the webmention plugin won't send me one, and then on my end, my page won't accept a webmention if your page doesn't have my URL on it.

Jeremy, congrats on owning your reading! I'd recently seen your note about using reading.am, but I've been on holiday and not had a chance to get back to you.

In general it seems like you've found most of the salient pieces I liked about it. For the record these include:
* I like the idea of "bookmarking" everything I'm reading as I read it. Even for things I don't quite finish, I often will want to know what the thing was or how to easily find it at a later date.
* It has an easy to use desktop bookmarklet that makes the friction of using it negligible. (On mobile I use the ubiquitous sharing icon and use my account's custom email address to email links to my account which is quick enough too.)
* Its RSS feed is useful (as you've discovered), but I've integrated it into my WordPress site using IFTTT.com for porting the data I want over. In my case I typically save the post as a draft and don't publicly publish everything that my lesser followed reading.am account does. Generally once a day I'll look at drafts to add some notes if necessary, or do some follow up reading/research (especially when I've read something interesting via mobile and didn't have the time), and then publish a subsection of the captured reads as public.

I've filed an issue with the developer to see if he'd include the comment data within Reading.am into the RSS feed so that it could be included in the passed data, so that when commenting there, the commentary could also be passed across to my site as well.

While I typically prefer to default to POSSE when I can, this PESOS workflow is generally acceptable to me because it required very little effort and I like having the drafts to determine which I should post publicly/privately as well as for a nudge on potential follow up for some of what I've read.

One other small thing I had done was (via plugin) to have any links on my site auto-post to the WayBackMachine on archive.org as I read/post them that way there's a back up version of what I'd read so that in the future copies are available even if the site goes down at a future date. I suspect you could do this with a simple POST call, an example of which I think is documented in the wiki.

As a subtle tweak you may wish to take a look at https://www.reading.am/p/4MDd/https://www.wired.com/2014/08/handle_change/. I noticed that you bookmarked something as read a second time having clicked through via a reading.am link. This causes reading.am to mark the second one as "Jeremy Cherfas is reading this because of Jeremy Cherfas" which means the "because of Jeremy Cherfas" manages to sneak into your RSS feed in the title. I suspect this wouldn't happen often, so you could probably ignore it, but you could throw it into your Regex filter to trim it out when it does happen. (When you click on reading.am links, they process to show that you're reading something as a result of someone else having posted it, which could show some interesting network effects though the reading.am network is relatively small.)

I know you're always saying that you're not a developer, but you've puzzled out a regex filter, implemented it, and posted it to your site for others to benefit. I would submit that you could now proudly wear the title even if you have no intention to do it professionally. Neither of us may be at the level of people like aaronpk or snarfed, but then, really, who is?

I also love that you've got a Webmention form set up, working, and looking great. Congratulations! If you want a small challenge, perhaps you could massage it to create a Grav plugin so others could easily implement it? If you want less challenge (and obligation for support), perhaps submit what you've got as an issue to the Grav Webemention plugin https://github.com/Perlkonig/grav-plugin-webmention and see if they'd add it into the bigger plugin where it would also make sense having it. (They may also default to having it use their own webmention implementation instead of the heroku version.) If nothing else, consider linking/documenting it on the wiki page for Grav where others may find it more easily in the future.

Jack, Your response (above on your site) is a good example of watching what is going on and knowing what your site can and can't do.

Because you put your response directly into the comment box on your site (ostensibly in a general sense to the main post rather than to my response), your site didn't send me a webmention for it and so I didn't know you had responded except that I happened to come back to your post. If you visit it, you'll see that your reply doesn't show up on http://stream.boffosocko.com/2017/i-think-a-lot-of-the-problem-comes-down-to

The better method using Known would have been for you to have clicked the permalink on your site for my comment (the date of my comment or the name of my site) that would have gone to my original, you could then have used the bookmarklet for Known (found at https://stream.baty.net/account/settings/tools/) and used it to quickly reply to my post. You could have optionally added a manual reply field to your original post URL as well and then you'd have received the webmention for it and maintained the entirety of the conversation on that first post.

Because I'm replying to both your post and mine, it should show up via webmention on both. The manual comment box on Known is really only for people whose sites don't support Webmention. Some people actually disable the comment box functionality and only receive Webmentions as a means of preventing spam comments.

In an ideal world, your comment box would send both Webmentions and salmentions to maintain the integrity of the comment thread. Since it doesn't (yet) then you need to do that manually, especially if you want me to see your reply.

I think a lot of the problem comes down to all of the siloed walls out there which are causing most of the friction. We're still relatively early days yet and only a tiny few are using the concept of salmention which would help keep running threads working properly. Admittedly having the context live somewhere and then having proper threaded communications isn't easy, so many do what they're able to for the moment.

I'm usually attempting to manually accomplish salmention as best as I'm able, but I may not hit every syndicated target unless you're displaying it directly. Additionally some targets just don't make sense--I'll webmention your original, for example, but this lengthy reply just won't look right at micro.blog if you syndicated a simple headline and URL there, so why bother since you'll see it at the original anyway? Others who are on micro.blog may miss out on part of the conversation, but presumably if they're looking at your copy on micro.blog, they'll be able to see the original as it was intended.

Colin, you mention that not all of your content needs to go to micro.blog. Perhaps, but to think so in my mind is part of the older silo way of thinking. The only reason you're syndicating there is as a stopgap to reach the people who don't currently have the time or luxury to be doing things the way you are. Otherwise they could subscribe to you directly at the source (and potentially even circumscribe the types of posts, keywords, or content to get exactly what they want from your site.) In some sense you syndicate there to reach and communicate with the non-IndieWeb crowd. Perhaps some of your content doesn't make as much sense there as Micro.blog is limited in what it is able to do, but that is its limitation, not yours. Eventually in a fully IndieWeb-ified world, everyone would have their own domain, their own data, and syndication of any sort won't have a real need to exist at all.

As to Jack's comment, syndicating things out to multiple places is often difficult as is getting all the responses back. (Fortunately services like Brid.gy make things far easier though they don't cover all the bases.) I do it in large part because while I prefer to own all of my content and have all the conversation take place on my personal site, I can't necessarily make that choice for everyone else. My mom is likely to never have her own domain much less a site. The only way she'll see my content (whether it's meant for her or not) is to syndicate it to Facebook. For those who aren't yet aware of the IndieWeb or using it, they're still reading and interacting on other platforms, which, for me is fine since I can still have my cake and eat it too. Eventually there will be inexpensive platforms that will let people who don't want to deal with the development cost and overhead that allow much of the IndieWeb-types of functionalities they're not currently getting from their silo platforms for free. I suspect that these will be easier and easier (as well as cheaper) to use over time. I suspect more people will use them for their freedom, flexibility, and increased control. Until then, I have the privilege of using my site much the way I would Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Flickr, GoodReads, etc., etc., I just get to do it through a more unified experience instead of having to juggle dozens of accounts and only being able to interact with my fractions of friends, family, and colleagues who coincidentally happen to be spending the time and effort to interact on those websites. As an example, I have dozens of friends who interact with me on Facebook about things I'm currently reading or finished reading, but if I was only doing this on GoodReads, they'd never have a chance to see it as they don't have accounts there or even know it exists. (Coincidentally, this is also the reason that GoodReads and most other silos allow one to syndicate their accounts to Twitter, Facebook, etc.)

Not all social sites are as lucky as Facebook to have such massive adoption. This creates a value imbalance with respect to the classic "network effect" (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect). Philosophically I think that an decentralized and distributed version of IndieWeb philosophies add far more value than having hundreds or even thousands of individual silos.

Invariably some people are likely to stick with Twitter, Facebook, or others because they don't have the same values I do. (Currently I suspect the majority do it because it's frictionless and easy.) But this doesn't change the fact that one can't have a "universal" conversation if one prefers. When I look at various platforms, some of them have different personalities and types of conversations because of the (possibly) self-selecting group of people on them. I loved Twitter more in the early days because of it's smaller and more engaged community--things have naturally changed drastically since those early days. Micro.blog is a bit more like it now, but to me it's not so much a social media replacement for Twitter. To me it's really a social reader that I use to quickly follow a subset of interesting and thoughtful people until I have a better social reader built into my own site. The conversation would be somewhat different if these silos were working on niche audience content like knitting or quantum mechanics, but typically they're not. Most social silos are geared toward mass adoption and broad topic discussion or content posting for everyone/everywhere. Their goal is for their site to be the proverbial "phone number and dial-tone of the web". Why do this when I already have a connection and a "phone number" that is my own site URL?

Jack, while some bloggers have turned off comments, they've often done so saying "Post your reply on your own site, or on Twitter, Facebook, etc." This has just pushed the conversation on their ideas off somewhere else which is disconnected and not as easily searchable or discoverable. And without some kind of notification mechanism, the author of the original post has no idea it exists. (I'll elide a conversation about blocking trolls and abuse here.) I've written some thoughts on comments sections in reply to such a blogger who recently re-enabled comments which also links to several interesting articles about the pros/cons of having comments at all. To me, between webmentions, spam filtering, and even moderation, we're lightyears ahead of where we were in the early 2000s.

One other thing I do find interesting is that the way all of this is set up is allowing us the ability to write extended thoughts and extended multiple replies (with civility as relative strangers). I don't think there are many sites on the web that allow this type of interaction, and they certainly don't do it with anything remotely close to the open architecture we're using. While at times it can be a headache for maintenance and problems, I find far more value in it than using anything else.

David, not sure how I'd missed your note originally, but a copy of the webmention just bubbled up for some reason!

I do use Woodwind occasionally; though it was often down or had issues it's been more reliable in the past few weeks/months than it had been in the prior year. I love the fact that I can use its interface to reply and react to posts directly.